The mid-winter months are a traditionally sleepy time for IFComp, as you may expect, but I can report (from my privileged vantage point) that Jacq has begun warming up the controls and taking charge of planning 2018’s competition. I know it seems prosaic to say every year that this year’s comp will be the best comp yet, but… well, I’m sure looking forward to October, and I hope you are too.

What with my newfound free time and all, I’ve assumed leadership of IFTF’s accessibility testing program. After guiding the team towards making some good progress in 2017, its chair, furkle, had to step down due to a shift in personal priorities. Happily, furkle will remain on the committee as its resident Twine expert, and the whole volunteer lineup from the program’s founding remains present and active. The program’s goal stays the same as well, if a bit calendar-shifted: we aim to deliver a report on the accessibility of interactive fiction software by the end of 2018. This will almost certainly involve a call for community participation, so: stay tuned.

In the meantime, and in the interest of transparency, I have made the program’s mailing-list archives public. This occurs with the team’s consent, after I pruned off and stashed away all discussion prior to this year. I consider this a bit of an experiment, but it’s a technique I learned about at the All Things Open conference a few months back, in a talk given by an Apache Software Foundation member. It struck me as an easy way for a community-funded nonprofit like ours to build further good-faith public accountability while also passively creating public documentation of our own work. If it fits well here, I plan to recommend that appropriate future IFTF mailing lists open up their archives as well.